Maxian continued to stare at him, anger smoldering in him.

Gaius Julius stepped away from the wall and made a little, hesitant half bow. “Apologies, Prince Maxian, I did not mean to endanger our enterprise. I will make sure that it does not happen again.”

Abdmachus held his breath for a moment, but then the Prince nodded and turned away, going back to the books on the table. Gaius Julius looked after him for a moment, then shrugged. He had plenty of perspective on the matter; he had already been dead once.

“Ah, my lord,” Abdmachus said.

Maxian looked up, his face a rigid mask.

“My lord, Gaius Julius-for all his faults-is right about one thing. We must move from these rooms. Not immediately, but surely within the week.”

“Why so?” the Prince growled, but his anger was beginning to fade.

“Here, my lord.” Abdmachus brushed the section of wall behind him. The symbols that he had been drawing were pale and faded. Under his fingertips, the plaster shaled away from the wall in a big chunk, clattering to the floor. Behind it, the lathes of the wall were revealed, corroded and eaten by termites and worms.

“You see? The building itself is being eroded by the power of the curse. Soon the walls and ceiling will collapse. I have checked the upper floors-they are no longer safe to walk on. There is a sewer main under the northern corner of the house. I fear that the mortar of its walls is weakening as well. If we remain, the building may soon collapse.”

Maxian sighed and slumped back in his chair. The weight of the effort was telling upon him. Each day some new complication arose, and still they had found nothing of note in the old books and records. The public histories of the early Empire were filled with nothing but praise for the first Emperor. The other records were all horrifically mundane-the daily accounts of clerks and scribes. Any books of sorcery or magic from the dawn of the Empire were well hidden away by the thaumaturges of the time or their current contemporaries. Maxian was sure that a single circumstance had precipitated this chain of events, but so far there was no sign of it. Further, there must be some mechanism, or several, that promulgated the curse through the centuries. Again, there was nothing that had stood out from the reams of dry parchments and papyrus.

“Then we will have to move. Where to?” The Prince’s voice was exhausted.

Abdmachus frowned now; this was an important consideration. Slowly he spoke. “Someplace near the city, but not within it. The curse is too strong within the walls. Someplace that is free from this influence… I don’t know. The suburbs are unknown to me.”

Gaius Julius, still rubbing the knot on the back of his head, spoke up. “If I understand you, magician, it should be a place that was not built by Romans. Perhaps someplace where the owner used imported laborers?”

Maxian slowly turned and stared at the dead man for a long moment. Then he smiled a little. “Abdmachus, our dead friend has the right of it. We need a villa or a summer house outside of the city, one built by a foreign ambassador, or merchant, or exile. Somebody that wanted a taste of home in their new surroundings. But it will have to be built by foreign hands, perhaps even with materials from beyond Italy or at least Latium. Can you find such a place while I pack the books and other materials?”

Gaius Julius raised a hand. “I will find the place, Prince. Abdmachus has important chanting and mumbling to get to. I will start this very evening.”

Maxian nodded. They needed a safe haven.

“I feel three and a half kinds of a fool, Prince Maxian,” Gaius Julius said as the two of them topped the rise on their horses. Maxian was riding a dappled chestnut he had borrowed from the stables maintained by his brother. The dead man was riding a skittish black stallion. Though he was obviously a masterful rider, the horse was tremendously nervous around him. Behind and below them, the vast sprawl of the city filled the valley of the Tiber. They were northeast of the city, not too far from the famous estate of the Emperor Hadrian at Tivoli. Here, low rolling hills rose up from the swampy bottomlands toward the distant spine of the Apennines.

The road they followed was in poor repair. The stone blocks were ridged by grass and some trees had sprouted at the edge of the road, cracking the carefully fitted stones. Still, the air was clear and the smell of orange trees filled the air with a heady scent. Maxian felt better already, just being out of the city. The contagion exerted ever more pressure on him now, and he felt it as a bone-deep weariness. They came to a high dark-green hedge and followed it through a tunnel of overarching trees to an ancient gate. Maxian pulled up, surprised to see that there were two sphinxes flanking the gateway.

Gaius halted as well and turned his horse. The corners of his eyes were crinkled up in amusement. He gestured at the gateway. “I felt the fool first for forgetting that this place was here at all.,Second, for forgetting that I had paid for it. Third, for forgetting that I had urged its construction and a half for being addled enough to bring her here, to the city.”

Maxian shook his head, puzzled by the rueful look on the face of the old man. “Who?”

Gaius laughed and spurred his horse through the gate. “Who? Don’t they teach that story to the young rich men anymore? A scandal indeed. She was a Greek all right, she came as a gift and nearly walked away with the whole party.”

Maxian followed and they rode up a short lane that ended in a circular garden. Beyond the garden, now overgrown with flowering shrubs and tall grass, stood a striking building. Twin lines of pillars flanked the central entrance on the opposite side of the garden. At the end of each line of pillars, a slab-sided obelisk rose. Two facing statues guarded the doorway, their half-man, half-beast bodies facing one another. Beyond this a flat-topped building rose up with two floors. Though perfectly situated on the grounds and within the context of the hills and the long slope behind it, it seemed an unexpected foreigner found-startlingly- at a family gathering.

“The Summer House of the last of the Ptolemies: Kleo-patra, Pharaoh of Egypt. Built by Egyptian and Phoenician craftsmen imported months in advance of her arrival in the city at my side. The stone was shipped by barge from the Upper Nile to Alexandria and thence, to Ostia. Five hundred stonemasons, carpenters, architects, and laborers came with it. It took them six months to raise this, after they had flattened the ground and built a berm down there to keep the slope from slipping.”

Gaius Julius pointed downslope, where a ridge was now overgrown with saplings and oak trees.

“Here she held court, while I muddled about in the politics of the city and prepared for my great expedition. It was a house of beauty, Prince, filled with scholars and philosophers. No real Roman, of course, no Senator, would come within miles of the place. Look around; they still do not build close to here. They felt that she was the very devil-temptress of the East. A harbinger of an ‘oriental despotism.’ And see what Octavian gave them… he who cursed her name the loudest.”

“Huh”1 was all Maxian said, staring around at the grand edifice. Even over long years, it still stood, an exemplar of the craftsmen that had built it. “Who owns it now?”

“Why,” Gaius Julius said with a grin, “you do, my lord. Or, rather, your brother owns it. It is a property of the state, but a forgotten one. We should be quite undisturbed here.”

Maxian swung himself down off his horse. He walked up the broad sandstone stairs to the first level of the house. The front portico was apparently solely for show; the pillars enclosed a long arcade on either side of the garden and shaded the front of the house. The roof was pocked with holes where stones and lumber had decayed and fallen down. He picked his way across the entryway and into the first room. In the dimness, he fumbled along the wall, then stopped, cursing himself. Gaius Julius, after hobbling the horses, joined him.